Bing has supported the use of emojis in your searches since last October. As WinBeta reported, they brought emoji support to search before Google.
Now it looks like Bing is experimenting with a new feature for emoji search, which I stumbled across this morning when I opened up my browser.
When I opened Bing I noticed there was a smiley face emoji at the end of the search box next to the query button. When I hovered over it the tooltip said Emoji Keyboard. And sure enough, when I clicked it a keyboard full of emojis appeared in the bottom right corner of Internet Explorer.
They keyboard is able to be dragged anywhere within the browser and offers a wide variety of emojis through five different tabs, each of which provides more choices when clicking Shift or Ctrl+Alt. It is similar in appearance to the keyboard on Windows 10 Mobile and has a flat look with gray buttons. The only way I could interact with it was through mouse clicks.
It appears the release of this emoji keyboard is limited or accidental as no one else at WinBeta has seen it appear in their browser. I was also only able to access it on Internet Explorer on my desktop PC. I couldn’t pull it up in Chrome on my PC or in either browser on my laptop. I checked to see if it would appear across devices tied to my Microsoft Account, but it did not.
The ability to search by emojis is interesting, especially if you’ve always wondered what exactly a certain little icon is suppose to depict. You can also search a string of emojis and see how Bing interprets it. After randomly selecting a devil face icon, a sheep icon, and a bee icon, Bing of course returned an info card for the honey badger… sure why not.
The keyboard is a fun little addition that is well designed and most likely useful to some emoji lovers out there.
Does the emoji keyboard show up for you in Bing? Let us know what you think of this new feature in the comment section below.
Further reading: Bing, Emoji, Emoji Keyboard, Microsoft
